Could 10 years ago have predicted where I am today?

I recently read an article somewhere (I forget where) that if you want to look at someone’s future 10 years from now, look at what they are doing today.

If I look at myself and where I am now, would 10 years ago have predicted where I am currently at?

First, let’s look at where I came from. I grew up in a middle class household, but that’s not enough of a description. The province in Canada where we lived – Manitoba – is not one of the wealthier provinces but at the same time, we did not live in a poor community. If you map out people’s classes the following way (using this article as a basis, you should read the whole thing), starting from the bottom up:

The lowest, poor class – chronically unemployed, generationally poor

Labor class level 1 – unskilled labor, work at fast food restaurants

Labor class level 2 – assembly line work

Labor class level 3 – pilots, plumbers, and small business owners

Gentry class level 1 – schoolteachers and starving artists

Gentry class level 2 – professions like engineering and law

Gentry class level 3 – scientists and entrepreneurs

Elite class – Although you can get a job in finance and make a few million and kind of get into this class, you’re mostly born into it. These are families with “old” money. They don’t work unless they want to.

Don’t confuse social class with economic class; you can be a wealthy plumber yet still be labor class because social class is more than money. Instead, it’s about economic opportunity, the people around you, your political beliefs and attitudes, your social beliefs and attitudes, and so forth.

My family was either Labor class 2 or Labor class 3. We weren’t poor, but we did live on an acreage out in the countryside about five miles outside of the nearest town of about 2000 people, and 20 min outside the nearest big city (of about 600,000 people). I can tell we were Labor class 2 or 3 because the families that we were friends with, and made up most of the other families, were the same as us. My friends’ parents had similar jobs with some variation. Our cousins’ families were similar to us, too, again with some variation.What cements the fact that we were Labor class were the things we enjoyed – my brother and I liked watching professional wrestling. Those are Labor class leisures.

I, along with my two siblings, went to university. I got a degree in computer engineering. For all the talk about how university isn’t worth the cost, the one thing it does teach you that you can’t learn in online courses is how the gentry class thinks. That was a big part of what I learned, especially when I took a class in sociology (half of which was wrong, but at least I know how they think).

Fast-forward to today, and I am in Gentry class 2. I somehow got and kept a job at a large tech company for 12 years. I am paid well and many days (most?) I wonder how I manage to have landed a position where I am overpaid as much as I am; I do feel guilty sometimes when I look back at the friends with whom I grew up and I out-earn all of them, and even some of my smarter classmates in high school, too.

I sometimes map myself along the household income scales you can find by doing web searches, and the wife and I – combined – are in the top 10% in the country which isn’t unusual for people living in Seattle, especially when one of them works in the tech industry. I am not complaining about how fortunate we are, nor bragging. It just is, and it contrasts with where I came from.

By the way, the top 10% sounds impressive but it isn’t. The top of the economic scale doesn’t get exorbitant until you get to the top 1% and even then, not until the top 10% of that 1%, that is, the top 0.1% of the country. But we are still doing fine.

So returning to my question from the start of this post – could 10 years ago have predicted where I am now?

10 years ago was 2006 and I was working back in Winnipeg for the same company I work for now, and I wasn’t getting paid that much money. However, there were a few things I was doing right:

I had started a few side businesses and failed at all of them. I failed in at least 3 network marketing businesses the five years prior to 2006.

I practiced researching and trading stocks. I spent a ton of time doing this. I got good at outperforming the market in up-trends but losing most of it in down-trends, and that’s why I quit. I did better doing passive trading.

I did some part-time gigs performing magic. These never paid a lot but I worked at it.

I did a lot of programming in my spare time while I was unemployed, I developed my own stock market trading simulator.

I read a lot of books on personal finance and got into Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of books, among others. So I was well aware of what it took.

In 2001, I was working for a tech company in the UK when I was laid off but got a pretty good redundancy payout. I invested £3000 into an investment account for long term retirement. It lost about 25% in a year, though, so I withdrew half.

I was cheap. I rarely spent money on frivolous things. In fact, after I moved back to Canada from the UK, I lived at home with my parents because it was cheaper.

So looking back on my habits from 10 years ago, it’s not that surprising that I am doing reasonably well now. I was good in school (but not university) and liked to read, was good at math and programming, and I was interested in finance. Today, I am in a stable position.

I look at some of my friends who are not in as good a position as I am. Some of them would spend money far too easily for my judgmental eyes and today, they struggle to financially get ahead or even to keep their heads above water.

I am fortunate to be in the position that I am in. It is a lot of luck that I was born in the family I was, that I was born in the country I was, in the time I was. But that is also augmented with some early habits I developed that have so far paid off such that I can do many of the things I want to do.

It is true that money does not buy happiness. However, what it does is allow you to do the things you like to do and pay to not have to do the things you don’t like to do.

The wife and I read a lot of books on personal finance. We are aggressively paying down the mortgage on the condo I bought in 2008, we put a lot into retirement savings, and I have a large chunk in regular savings. We have met with a financial adviser, we take financial planning classes, we have a will (!), and the strangest thing is that now we get invitations in the mail to attend free dinners put on by people trying to sell us things. So far, we’ve done one for solar panel installations, and then I went to another one for learning how to invested in Fixed Index Annuities. I think we’re going to one or two more in the next couple of weeks.

So, what will things look like 10 years from today? Will the things we’re doing now pay off then?

We’ll see.

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Another description of the social classes and labor classes can be found here: